Dora Vargha
Visiting Scholar (Aug 2021-Jun 2026)
Dr.
Dora Vargha is Professor of History and Medical Humanities at the University of Exeter and will be joining Humboldt University’s Department of History in September 2021. She is a historian of medicine, science and technology, with expertise in the history of epidemics, the politics of health, and Cold War history. Her work focuses on questions of global health and biomedical research in the Cold War era, using the locality of Eastern Europe as a starting point.
Her current collaborative project, After the End of Disease critically addresses and dislocates geographies and narratives of disease and health. She is exploring ways to think about international and global public health outside of the framework of Geneva and US-based NGOs; and to question straightforward scripts of beginnings, crises and endings when it comes to disease.
In the next five years, Dora will be leading two research groups on interconnected projects. “Connecting Three Worlds,” a Wellcome Collaborative Award based at the University of Exeter will be exploring socialist networks in global health history together with co-investigators Dr. Sarah Marks (Birkbeck) and Prof. Edna Suarez-Diaz (UNAM). At Humboldt, Dora will be leading the ERC Starting Grant research group “Socialist Medicine: an Alternative Global Health History.”
Projects
Selected Publications
Vargha, Dora (2023). “Missing Pieces: Integrating the Socialist World in Global Health History.” History Compass 21 (7, Article e12779). https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12779.
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Vargha, Dora (2021). “Technical Assistance and Socialist International Health: Hungary, the WHO and the Korean War.” History and Technology 36 (3–4): 400–417. https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2020.1863623.
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Greene, Jeremy and Dora Vargha (2020). “‘Ends of Epidemics’ in COVID-19 and World Order: The Future of Conflict, Competition, and Cooperation.” In COVID-19 and World Order: The Future of Conflict, Competition, and Cooperation, ed. H. Brands and F. J. Gavin, 23–39. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. https://doi.org/10.1353/book.77593.
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Vargha, Dora (2020). “Reconsidering the Dramaturgy.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 94 (4): 690–698. https://doi.org/10.1353/bhm.2020.0090.
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Past Events
Workshop
Health Beyond Medicine Workshop: Endings and After
MOREBook Launch
CANCELLED: (Cows, Toads, and Other) Technologies of Reproduction: A Double Book Launch & Film Screening
MORESeminar
Global Health on the Move
MOREInstitute's Colloquium
Patient Activism in the Public Sphere
MORESeminar
In Search of Biomedical Validity: Towards a Cross-Disciplinary History of Validation Practices
MOREInstitute's Colloquium
- Institute Event
Forensic Diplomacy and International Technical Cooperation: The Case of Mexico’s Extraordinary Mechanism for Forensic Identification
MORETalk
The Fetus and the Lamb: The Many Histories of the Auckland Antenatal Steroid Clinical Trial
MORETalk
Latrines, Vaccines, and Socialist Doctors: Health in Mozambique’s Weekly Magazine "O Tempo"
MORETalk
A Cosmopolitan Parasite: Tracking Toxoplasma Between Laboratory Diagnostics and Regionalized Public Health Measures
MOREInstitute's Colloquium
- Institute Event
Canceled: Atomic Junction: Nuclear Power in Africa at the Crossroads
MOREInstitute's Colloquium
- Institute Event
Debating “Scientific Warfare” in Republican China
MOREPresentations, Talks, & Teaching Activities
Conference of the ERC Nepostrans Project, Dedicated to the Memory of Emil Niederhauser and Istvan Deak. Budapest, Hungary
EAHMH, Oslo, Norway
EAHMH, Oslo, Norway
International conference held at Harnack Haus
Medical Humanities Workshop, Oxford University, UK
CENTRAL Workshop: Commodities, Trade, and Materiality in the Global Cold War, organised by The Research Centre for the History of Transformations (RECET), University of Vienna, Austria
University of Strasbourg, France
European Society for Social Science History Conference, Göteborg, Sweden
Oxford University Seminar in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology
‘Gendered Knowledges in Times of Crisis’ Colloquium. Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin.
Paper to be presented at the colloquium of the Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen
Pre-Doctoral Research Seminar, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin
Colloquium of the Institute and Museum of the History of Medicine, University of Zurich
ISCHE 34-SHCY-DHA “Internationalization in Education (18th-20th centuries)” conference, Geneva, Switzerland
10th Annual LSE-GWU-UCSB Cold War Graduate Conference, London, UK
Colloquium of the History Department at the University of Regensburg, Germany